Today, the grid announced that the makeover of its welcome area is complete.

“We have found that a mega for a welcome area was not a good idea,” said grid spokesperson Leslie van Kessel, also known as Leslie Kling in-world.

“People could not set home and over-scripting caused some lag issues,” she explained. “We think with the new layout things should be better all around.”

Check out the country pub in Silver Horses Park in the Silver Forest region. (Image courtesy Tangle Grid.)

Megaregions are a work-around to issues inherited from Second Life viewers. Now that OpenSim has its own, dedicated viewers, these issues have been addressed in the latest experimental version of OpenSim with the development of varregions. However, that feature won’t be available to everyone until the next official distribution of OpenSim comes out, due later this year.

In addition, it requires that all the users have current viewers, like the latest version of Firestorm and Singularity. However, some users still use older viewers, or even Imprudence, which hasn’t been updated for three years but is still in use because it’s a reliable workhorse.

Then there’s the Tangle Service Center, or TSC, home to the headquarters for the grid. This region also hosts the classroom for the mentor training school, the grid meetings, and all the rental boxes.

The Teleport Hud Center is the region from which residents can explore the grid, with an in-world teleportation system.

The Tangle Town region. (Image courtesy Tangle Grid.)

Also in the welcome neighborhood is the Tangle Town region where merchants can get a free 250-prim shop for three months, and the Tangle Suburbs regions, which offers free 350-prim apartments to new residents, also for three months.

Then there’s the obligatory Tangle Freebie Village, filled with Linda Kellie furniture as well as other donated content, and a Sandbox Area region with six platforms that allow privacy for users who are busy building or importing.

Maria Korolov is editor and publisher of Hypergrid Business. She has been a journalist for more than twenty years and has worked for the Chicago Tribune, Reuters, and Computerworld and has reported from over a dozen countries, including Russia and China.

WhiteStar

Kokua & Cool VL Viewer also support VAR Regions and have done so for some time now. Sadly it’s Easter weekend and the PixieViewer hasn’t been updated… OpenSim really NEEDS the Browser Viewer to get new users involved & engaged without having to download a heavy weight viewer with major learning curve. The bigger the accessible “audience” is, the faster & bigger OpenSim will grow.

Joe Builder

Cool viewer and Older version of singularity do not support Var Regions at least in osgrid also teleporting from a region using 7.6 also will not work. As many try daily, Just don’t work. Also for Tangle grid, Megas work just fine for Welcome regions if you know how to use them, And that’s fairly simple.